I am interested in portraying Tumaco’s youth who lives between two worlds: the complex rural Colombian Pacific coast and the eclecticism of the globalized world. Young people who, like their own geography, grow like metaphors of adversity where precariousness coexist together with beauty and hope.

These photographs will be taken in Tumaco, one of the areas from where the most cocaine is taken out of Colombia. Its geography is a history of poverty, very low education, precarious health system and up to 70% unemployment. Tumaco has the highest violent deaths rate in the whole country and is the place where the recent peace agreement between Colombia and the Farc guerrilla has the most complications to overcome, specifically with disarmament.

I’m attracted to these young people because they are full of dreams and seek their own identity amidst a very precarious context. I was particularly interested in portraying men because of the contrast between their strong, handsome body, but also vulnerable in a context of war and precariousness. The men who are portrayed here are young people who, with music and dance, resist the destiny of violence and difficulties that is constantly present when you are born here.

Usually this is an unknown area for a large part of the country and the world. On the other hand, the representation of Afro-Colombianity has been made from stereotypes that do not do justice to the wealth, strength and dignity that this people has sustained throughout its complex existence.